YAPC::NA 2008 Day 2
I got up and took a taxi to campus. The first talk of the day was Social Perl. It was a 20 minute talk and the speaker waited 10 of those minutes to be introduced. It seemed like a really good talk (about using Perl to manage all your profiles on the social networking sites) but he ran out of time and was leaving the conference immediately.
The second talk was Dave's FEY talk. This was one I was actually a bit interested in (for the SQL generation feature and not the ORM). Unfortunately, it too was a 20 minute talk and Dave ran out of time. Oh well, I asked him to put his slides online and he did :-)
Next I went to Josh's Perl 5 VM - Symphony of Horror talk. Wow. This is one that I thought was too advanced. Actually, this is one of the things that I had problems with in the talk abstracts. Selecting "beginner", "intermediate", or "advanced" is way too subjective. Even for someone who considers them self an advanced perl programmer - if they have not written any C, have any familiarity with the perl internals, or the op tree - they probably didn't get anything out of this talk. Ironically, this is Josh's prerequisite talk to some of his more advanced talks. I suggested providing a list of assumed knowledge items. I think I was the only one with a question or comment.
The next two talks were Stevan Little's Moose talk and Patrick Michaud's Rakudo talk. These were both very good. I am more interested in Moose now than I was before. I didn't really need to be sold on Rakudo - I already follow it. There just wasn't anything opposite it that I was interested in.
I had the BBQ today - made sure I knew exactly where it was. It was about the same quality of food as the cafeteria but it was cooked on the grill and was only $5. Besides, it is about the people (and later about the beer).
After lunch I went to Jeff's mod_parrot talk. Wow. I absolutely abhor coding anything web related but this was neat.
Next I went to Patrick's Parrot Compiler Toolkit talk. This I thought I already knew about (hanging out in #parrot and all) but wow - very very cool. I didn't realize how far this thing took you in creating a new language to target parrot. You are provided both a top down rec-descent parser and a top-up precedence parser that work in tandem. This is fantastic stuff. This isn't just me spreading Perl 6 and Parrot advocacy. I was truly impressed.
I skipped the last talk of the day. There was a job fair in the lobby and I wanted to see what the market was like since I have never worked as a Perl programmer.
The banquet and auction started at 6.
It is tradition for the PerlMonks attendees (thanks Bruce for letting me know) to pool their money to bid on one of the Perl celebrities for lunch the next day. Since we we were pretty sure that we were going to win, Tye and I worked it out so that it looked like we would be competing against each other rather than working together. Since the money was for TPF - we didn't want to get Larry for the cheapest amount possible.
I ate with a couple of guys that seemed not to be too extroverted. It was a nice conversation but I had drinking - er um, bidding - to do. There was both a silent auction and a live auction. I only bid on one item in the silent auction - "Programming Erlang". I had to go up 3 times on my offer because someone else was crazy enough to spend too much on it. In the end, I won.
I had just returned from the ATM when I saw that "Hanging out with Randal" was about to go for $44. I immediately bid $60. Then I asked if I could bid $65 NOT to hang out with Randal. Unfortunately, I said Larry when I meant Randal so everyone knew how drunk I was getting. Well my bidding must have done the trick because then I had competition. The counter bid was $110 and Tye had agreed to contribute $20 so I bid $120. The 3 of us decided to pool our money and bid $200. We ended up shooting pool which was nice. Randal and I got a chance to talk about Smalltalk and Seaside.
The next item that I was interested in bidding on was a hand calligraphy copy of "The First Letter of Erudil to the Monasterians". Unfortunately, I needed to save my money for bidding on lunch with Larry. Fortunately, no one else seemed to know who Erudil was or what the letter was all about (here I thought everyone must be a PerlMonk). The put the item aside and then went to lunch with Larry - or so Jess thought.
Uri put the next item up for auction - the right to auction off Larry. The bidding didn't move to fast but then a confused attendee named Jess bid $60. She was pretty surprised that not only did she not win Larry, that she would have to stand up in front of everyone and auction him off. We (the PerlMonk contingent) had already spoken on what our max numbers would be and I was volunteered to do the bidding. Tye would occasionally bid against me to make things seem more interesting. When it looked like we would win for $350, Uri told Jess that she could go with the PerlMonk's group so she actually did get Larry - Tye couldn't get out of his seat fast enough to bid $400 (you would think there were no attractive female geeks the way some folks were behaving). In any event, I immediately replied "PerlMonks bid $450". There were no counter bids. "Going once, Going twice". I interjected and said "PerlMonks ups their own offer to $500". Again, this was for TPF.
Around 11, Randal indicated he had to go because he had to get up at 4AM and I decided to leave with him so we could share a cab. While Randal and I waited for a taxi, we had a conversation with Larry who was calling it a night as well. Once I got to the hotel, I prepared to checkout the next day.
The second talk was Dave's FEY talk. This was one I was actually a bit interested in (for the SQL generation feature and not the ORM). Unfortunately, it too was a 20 minute talk and Dave ran out of time. Oh well, I asked him to put his slides online and he did :-)
Next I went to Josh's Perl 5 VM - Symphony of Horror talk. Wow. This is one that I thought was too advanced. Actually, this is one of the things that I had problems with in the talk abstracts. Selecting "beginner", "intermediate", or "advanced" is way too subjective. Even for someone who considers them self an advanced perl programmer - if they have not written any C, have any familiarity with the perl internals, or the op tree - they probably didn't get anything out of this talk. Ironically, this is Josh's prerequisite talk to some of his more advanced talks. I suggested providing a list of assumed knowledge items. I think I was the only one with a question or comment.
The next two talks were Stevan Little's Moose talk and Patrick Michaud's Rakudo talk. These were both very good. I am more interested in Moose now than I was before. I didn't really need to be sold on Rakudo - I already follow it. There just wasn't anything opposite it that I was interested in.
I had the BBQ today - made sure I knew exactly where it was. It was about the same quality of food as the cafeteria but it was cooked on the grill and was only $5. Besides, it is about the people (and later about the beer).
After lunch I went to Jeff's mod_parrot talk. Wow. I absolutely abhor coding anything web related but this was neat.
Next I went to Patrick's Parrot Compiler Toolkit talk. This I thought I already knew about (hanging out in #parrot and all) but wow - very very cool. I didn't realize how far this thing took you in creating a new language to target parrot. You are provided both a top down rec-descent parser and a top-up precedence parser that work in tandem. This is fantastic stuff. This isn't just me spreading Perl 6 and Parrot advocacy. I was truly impressed.
I skipped the last talk of the day. There was a job fair in the lobby and I wanted to see what the market was like since I have never worked as a Perl programmer.
The banquet and auction started at 6.
It is tradition for the PerlMonks attendees (thanks Bruce for letting me know) to pool their money to bid on one of the Perl celebrities for lunch the next day. Since we we were pretty sure that we were going to win, Tye and I worked it out so that it looked like we would be competing against each other rather than working together. Since the money was for TPF - we didn't want to get Larry for the cheapest amount possible.
I ate with a couple of guys that seemed not to be too extroverted. It was a nice conversation but I had drinking - er um, bidding - to do. There was both a silent auction and a live auction. I only bid on one item in the silent auction - "Programming Erlang". I had to go up 3 times on my offer because someone else was crazy enough to spend too much on it. In the end, I won.
I had just returned from the ATM when I saw that "Hanging out with Randal" was about to go for $44. I immediately bid $60. Then I asked if I could bid $65 NOT to hang out with Randal. Unfortunately, I said Larry when I meant Randal so everyone knew how drunk I was getting. Well my bidding must have done the trick because then I had competition. The counter bid was $110 and Tye had agreed to contribute $20 so I bid $120. The 3 of us decided to pool our money and bid $200. We ended up shooting pool which was nice. Randal and I got a chance to talk about Smalltalk and Seaside.
The next item that I was interested in bidding on was a hand calligraphy copy of "The First Letter of Erudil to the Monasterians". Unfortunately, I needed to save my money for bidding on lunch with Larry. Fortunately, no one else seemed to know who Erudil was or what the letter was all about (here I thought everyone must be a PerlMonk). The put the item aside and then went to lunch with Larry - or so Jess thought.
Uri put the next item up for auction - the right to auction off Larry. The bidding didn't move to fast but then a confused attendee named Jess bid $60. She was pretty surprised that not only did she not win Larry, that she would have to stand up in front of everyone and auction him off. We (the PerlMonk contingent) had already spoken on what our max numbers would be and I was volunteered to do the bidding. Tye would occasionally bid against me to make things seem more interesting. When it looked like we would win for $350, Uri told Jess that she could go with the PerlMonk's group so she actually did get Larry - Tye couldn't get out of his seat fast enough to bid $400 (you would think there were no attractive female geeks the way some folks were behaving). In any event, I immediately replied "PerlMonks bid $450". There were no counter bids. "Going once, Going twice". I interjected and said "PerlMonks ups their own offer to $500". Again, this was for TPF.
Around 11, Randal indicated he had to go because he had to get up at 4AM and I decided to leave with him so we could share a cab. While Randal and I waited for a taxi, we had a conversation with Larry who was calling it a night as well. Once I got to the hotel, I prepared to checkout the next day.
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